The real estate market. In many countries, the value of labor and materials necessary to build a house is about 30 to 40 40 to 120 thousand euros. Everything else is speculation.

Edit. Initially I put 30 to 40 thousand euros.

They also used copyrighted material without the consent of the authors to train their models.

They polluted the air and stole clean water from communities who lived close to their data centers.

Hoarding RAM is only the tip of the iceberg.

Realistically?

• Housing that doesn't cost a fortune

• Healthcare that doesn't bankrupt you

• Food that's both affordable and worth eating

None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.

Writing code is only the tip of the iceberg. You actually have to:

• understand how the company works
• understand the use case you are managing and how it relates to other business flows
• understand strenghts and weaknesses of the technologies, libraries and frameworks involved
• decide which one to use and how
• thinking about all possible corner cases, evaluating their frequency and importance
• only at the end, write, test, optimize the code

While large language models can help in the last step, they are very limited in previous ones, except working as a search engine on steroids.

Great job by Ken Klippenstein as usual. After Snowden leaks and Wikileaks in general, USA spying the Pope is not surprising.

Value is how much socially necessary labor it actually took to build and maintain that house: materials, construction work, infrastructure, etc. It’s the real human effort crystallized in the building.

Price is what they slap on it in the market, which can be wildly disconnected from its actual value. In housing, price gets inflated by speculation, land monopolies, credit bubbles, location hype, and landlord parasites treating homes as investment vehicles to extract rent.

So you might have a crumbling flat that cost relatively little labor to build 40 years ago, but because it's in a "desirable area" with a housing shortage artificially maintained by capital, its price skyrockets. That is a socially enforced ransom, not the value.

https://open.oregonstate.education/sociologicaltheory/chapter/value-price-and-profit/

Yury Gagarin and Gina Lollobrigida. First man into space and one of the most famous actresses back then.

And before anyone says it: "But at least parking lots are more aesthetically pleasing than Soviet khrushchevkas and panelkas." And: "But China has ghost cities!"

Quick explainer: Khrushchevkas were the low-rise mass housing blocks from the Khrushchev era: thin walls, tiny kitchens, built fast and cheap. Panelkas came later under Brezhnev, taller and made of prefab concrete panels, equally grim. Both defined Soviet urban landscapes for decades. Both were cramped, often poorly insulated, and not visually inspiring. But sure, tell me a parking lot is an upgrade.

Because blocking web sites is worse than bombing civilians for decades, right?

In a declassified document from the 1950s (exact year illegible), CIA considers the changes in the Soviet leadership, following the death of Stalin. The document begins with a somewhat surprising appraisal of Stalin.

Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist's power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely captain of a team (...)

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

"Let them eat cake" moment.

Jokes apart, the children of the rich are obese, the children of the poor are too thin. Both tendencies contribute to malnutrition.

https://globalnutritionreport.org/resources/nutrition-profiles/europe/western-europe/france/

Average drunk human coding skils

I lived in Soviet Union. Kyrgyz Socialist Soviet Republic to be precise. And you?

Maybe study the whole story before writing. From Wikipedia:

In 1961, the U.S. started deploying 15 Jupiter IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) nuclear missiles near Izmir, Turkey, which directly threatened cities in the western sections of the Soviet Union. These missiles were regarded by President John F. Kennedy as being of questionable strategic value; a nuclear submarine was capable of providing the same cover with both stealth and superior firepower. In the late 1950's missile technology was well developed in the field of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), as opposed to ICBMs (intercontinental-ballistic missiles) which could not be kept in a state of readiness at all times.

MRBMs represented only a small portion of the total American nuclear arsenal, but still much larger than the U.S.S.R.'s. Soviet strategists realized that some nuclear equality could be efficiently reached by placing missiles in Cuba. Soviet MRBMs on Cuban soil, with a range of 2,000 km (1,200 statute miles), could threaten Washington, DC and around half of the U.S. SAC bases (of nuclear-armed bombers), with a flight time of under twenty minutes. In addition, the U.S.'s radar warning systems oriented toward USSR would have provided little warning of a launch from Cuba.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had publicly expressed his anger at the Turkish deployment, and regarded the missiles as a personal affront. The deployment of missiles in Cuba - the first time Soviet missiles were moved outside the USSR - is commonly seen as Khrushchev's direct response to the Turkish missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

Merz’s declaration is a stark admission: German capitalism can no longer sustain social protections without undermining profits and war funding. The solution? Expropriate the billionaires, end militarization, and reorganize society around human needs, not profit. Otherwise, we’re headed toward a dystopian future where pensioners starve while Rheinmetall shareholders celebrate.

The top trading partners of Spain are France, Germany and Italy. This is logical, because countries tend to trade more with closest neighbors.

In 2024, Spain had a trade deficit towards the United States of America of $10.9 billion. This means that the USA sell much more stuff to Spain than vice versa.

So the USA cutting all trade with Spain will be positive for Spanish trade deficit.

Some specialized medications and health supplements can be bought only in the USA. That would be a problem.

This is like killing natives in America and sending there people from Africa.

Your guess seems to be confirmed by a peer reviewed paper in Sociology, The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell:

the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes--coercive, mimetic, and normative--leading to this outcome.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095101

They want to keep their jobs, to earn their salaries, to live in peace.

They have fought wars, winning some, losing many, and have learned that opposing the system is not worth the cost.

Domenico Losurdo wrote a book about that, “Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn”: https://mronline.org/2025/01/11/domenico-losurdo-western-marxism-how-it-was-born-how-it-died-how-it-can-be-reborn/